Of all the great masters of design who emerged from the progressive Bauhaus art school in Germany, Josef Albers (1888-1976) was possibly the most fundamental and rigorous in his modernist beliefs – and that really is saying something.

Albers was a mathematician and a theorist as well as an artist and designer. It was his experiments in formulating colour theory while at the Bauhaus – as both student and teacher, in both its Weimar and Dessau periods – that forms a key part of his artistic reputation.

Without You by filmmaker and graphic artist Tal Rosner is an intelligent and engaging reflection on the trademark compositions of one of the 20th century’s true giants of modern art and design, a man of formidable self-discipline in all he created.

The film opens with a line from the Josef Albers poem that inspired the piece:

Calm down
what happens
happens mostly
without you.

It then adopts the sites of nondescript industrial estates in the middle of nowheresville to remix some of Albers’s most characteristic series – such as his long-running Homage to the Square, which builds chromatic interactions of flat coloured squares.

Rapid-cut montages and angled sequences of colour and shape are extracted from the study of the drab prefabricated modern sheds that are among the less welcome aspects of the international legacy of modernism, one of the great gifts of the Bauhaus.

On top of all this is mapped a pastoral layer that keeps creeping into the ghost of the machine – sketches of birds and trees and shots of billowing clouds. You can even hear birdsong amid the factory soundtrack of precision clicks and clanks.

Without You can be read in a number of ways – as a pure visual design essay that is a delight to the eye, a critique on modernism, as a lament for the pastoral. What it does for this viewer is to pay homage to the primary-coloured geometric greatness of Albers and his peers while simultaneously evoking a sense of loss at what the modern industrial world, so clinically catalysed by the Bauhaus, has displaced or destroyed.

The abstract design principles and rigid colour theories of Albers and his fellow masters Gropius, Breuer and Moholy-Nagy, have often been criticised as leading to an architecture reduced to an entirely aesthetic construct in a world devoid of real human contact.

Rosner casts an expressive animator’s eye over the acreage of industrial ugliness, the pylons, steel shutters and surveillance cameras, incongruously drawing out the vivid and intense design experiments that lie beneath its monotonous surface and alluding to the natural world it has erased.

One is encouraged to think that if Josef Albers had enjoyed access to digital filmmaking techniques in Dessau, he would have produced something with the qualities of Without You.

Jeremy Myerson is director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre at the Royal College of Art, London, and the author of a number of books on design and visual culture.